Brittni Pater

MAGNOLIA (Arkansas) (AP) — On the shelf above her computer, in the bedroom she left just before her death, Brittni Pater left a Bible open to Psalm 25.

The chapter asks God not to remember the rebellious ways of youth, but rather to show mercy and kindness, the Rev. Brad Justice told hundreds gathered Wednesday for the 15-year-old’s funeral.

“The worst this world can do is kill us, but God will take care of us,” Justice said.

The sanctuary at Immanuel Baptist Church was filled with several hundred people, many of them teen-agers, and in an adjoining fellowship hall, another hundred-plus mourners watched Brittni’s funeral on two large-screen television sets.

Some teen-agers passed facial tissues among themselves to wipe away tears, while others brushed back tears with their hands, mourning the death of the girl whose body was found Saturday near a shallow grave that authorities say was dug before she was killed.

Brittni, who was pregnant, was bludgeoned to death, authorities say, after leaving a note to her parents saying something had happened and she had to take care of it. She then snuck out of the house, never to return, Columbia County Sheriff Wayne Tompkins said.

Her body was found a short while after she was picked up by her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Tompkins said. Two fellow students at Magnolia High School have been charged with capital murder in connection with her death.
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Two teenaged boys, Matthew Ryan Elliott, 16, and William Davis, 17, plotted for at least three weeks to kill 15-year old Brittni Pater, who was 12 weeks pregnant. They dug a grave for her on February 4, 2000 and picked up some large sheets of plastic from the Kroger grocery store where Davis worked.
They bludgeoned her repeatedly with a long, heavy metal bar wrapped with heavy tape around one end, as though the person who wielded it wanted to make sure he was able to get a good grip, investigators said. Then they ran her down with their car and dumped her battered body in an old gravel pit.
Elliott immediately bragged to his friends about how he had killed Brittni.
Several students have told investigators that they heard Matthew discussing plans to kill Brittni, the sheriff said. And authorities believe that Brittni knew she was going to die. At some point before her death, Matthew told Brittni they weren’t headed to an abortion clinic, the county sheriff said. “We think he told her he was going to kill her.”
Elliott and Davis were both charged with capital murder after giving statements in which Brittni’s pregnancy was cited as the reason she was killed. On November 2, 2000, a Columbia County jury found Davis guilty of capital murder for his part in the fatal beating.

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". . . some persons will shun crime even if we do nothing to deter them, while others will seek it out even if we do everything to reform them. Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people. And many people, neither wicked nor innocent, but watchful, dissembling, and calculating of their opportunities, ponder our reaction to wickedness as a cue to what they might profitably do. We have trifled with the wicked, made sport of the innocent, and encouraged the calculators. Justice suffers, and so do we all."